


Succo di Albicocca (Apricot Juice)

by cinderadler



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name (2017) RPF
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, Blow Jobs, Confusion, Dancing, First Kiss, First Time, Fluff and Angst, Gift Giving, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Masturbation in Shower, Mutual Masturbation, Neck Kissing, Nosebleed, Summer Romance, Talking, Tenderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:28:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22107079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cinderadler/pseuds/cinderadler
Summary: Do we speak, or do we die?We speak, but not with our mouths full.
Relationships: Annella Perlman/Samuel Perlman, Implied Marzia/Elio, Oliver/Elio Perlman
Comments: 29
Kudos: 99





	1. Idylls

It’s bright outside. I can see the sunlight through his hair and I’m falling in love, I think.

“So, we speak or we die; I’m told.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“And do you? Speak or die?” He asks me like he’s genuinely interested. After a moment, I answer him. I’ve been watching his hair be touched by the breeze.

“I’m always going to die, but I suppose I must speak before then.” It feel like the truth. He smiles at me like he knows what I’m thinking. He cannot, but there’s a sincerity in his eyes when he pauses and looks at me that makes my stomach sink. He lifts my wrist with his hand and looks at the time on my watch.

“There’s no time to waste, then. Speak, Elio.” Oliver’s tone is soft but certain. He lets go of my wrist and I can’t comprehend how long we’ve been here suddenly. I can’t think what to say. I think-I love—

“Come with me.” I say. I look him straight in the eye. He takes my sunglasses from my head and places them over my eyes.

“Your eyes already said it.” He whispers as he walks to his bike. “But, sure. Take me somewhere.”

“Only if you stop trying to be funny.” I scramble up and feel myself close up again, like a blossoming flower in reverse. There’s an unknowable coldness that Oliver carries with him, that he knows more than I ever could about the living of life and that makes him charming and arrogant and able to cut you with words, and then smile like it never happened. Maybe he has a taste for blood?

“No promises.” He rings his bicycle bell as he sits astride it, grinning. “Guide me, Elio. Take me with you.”

“Come on.” I smile without meaning to and start a pace, making him catch up with me. 

-

We ride for almost an hour, taking in the vibrant scenery coloured in by the summer’s glow.

After almost an hour, I’ve brought Oliver into my paradise grove. We’re standing in a dell with a small pond in its heart. Flowing trees cover the water and the nearby bank. It’s peaceful here, perhaps the most peaceful place on earth. The water trickles out the pond into a spring a way down the mountainside. The ground is mossy and soft under barefoot.

This place is mythic to me.

I offer my hand and he takes it by the fingers as I lead him into the cold water.

“It’s freezing!” He balks. I stand there for a long time, just looking at Oliver as he looks at me. We long for the gap between us to change but can’t move first. Eventually, he wades closer to me, frightening the distance between us with his size. He intends for it to disappear.

He’s taller than I am, even in the water, as he moves his arm tentatively up to my lower back. He holds me closer to him, so close I can smell his skin. He smells like apricots and soil. I reach my head up to whisper in his ear. You knew. You feel it too.

But, before I can, he sweeps his leg around the back of mine and tips me into the water.

“You bastard! It’s cold in here!” I bring my head up and splash him. He picks me up.

“Sorry, sorry! I just couldn’t resist.” He laughs and offers me his hand to the bank. “Let’s get that off. You’re soaked.”

“Oh, I wonder why, Oliver?” I quip and wrestle my shirt off. He laughs with me.

“At least, take mine. That was cruel of me.” He’s in good spirits as he pulls his own shirt off by the neck and holds it out to me. He emanates warmth. I just look at him.

“Thanks.” I say as I pull his shirt on over my head. “It _is_ the least you could do.”

We lie still in the grass, basking in the sun.

Beside me, close enough to touch, he’s been quiet for some time. We lie with our eyes closed to the glistening light. I can hear birds in the trees behind us. I am fascinated by the notion of his skin, hot and inches from me.

“Oliver?”

Does he speak?

He does and he says “Later.” I imagine. That’s what it’ll be.

It’s peculiar to think that when I’m restless and alone, it’s because of him. This man, who stood at our breakfast table unaware of how beautiful the light caught him.

Because all that time, he was thinking that of me.

How strange.

“Elio-?” He pulls me out of my daydream. “This place is beautiful.”

“The sun gets in your eyes out here, don’t you think?”

“Let me.” Oliver leans over me and raises his fingers over my eyes, blocking out the glare of the sun. “Like I said—“ He looks into my eyes like he’s looking for something he’s lost. “—this place is—-“ He doesn’t finish his sentence with words. He kisses me softly. I kiss him back with all the quiet longing I couldn’t put into words. A hand sinks into my hair and I feel like I’m under the water again. I’m breathless for a brief moment as I reach up to hold onto Oliver’s face. I feel his lips smile, I think. He pushes his lips against mine for a moment, certain as he does, before he pushes my chest down into the ground with his fingertips. We prise apart as he sits upright beside me, looking over his shoulder at me.

“Better now?” He smiles devilishly, happy with himself but contented on a lower level.

I wait a moment, playing with grass between my fingers.

“You taste like apricots.”

“You taste like cherries and fear.”

“It’s not fear.”

“Isn’t it? Then what is it, know-all?”

“Cigarettes.” He laughs at me dryly.

“Fine, then; cherries and cigarettes. And I wouldn’t change it.” He tucks a long strand of grass behind my ear. My skin tingles. His touch is like a feather as he brushes his fingers over my ear and along my jawbone. He brings a finger to my lips and holds it there. I purse my lips and touch it with the tip of my tongue.

“It’s alright to be scared, you know. You don’t know it’s alright yet, but trust me; it is. Embrace it. Let it make you fast and strong for that moment. You’ll never have this exact moment again.” His touch lingers on my hand as he brings his lips down to my ear. “And, I promise you, we all taste roughly the same.” He whispers. I flinch and shiver and he breaks into a smile. I push him over onto the ground and kiss him fiercely.

“Elio, Elio, Elio!” He sputters after a moment, laughing, lifting me off him. “We’d better go.”

-

The night closes in around us as we ride, side by side. Occasionally, Oliver passes me and I him and we touch fleetingly. We skirt each other’s skin with our own. It’s perfect.

As with all things, it comes to an abrupt end when we arrive home. It’s just in time for dinner, but judging by the bicycle outside, my parents have invited Marzia.

“Elio, Oliver; you’re back at last!” My mother rejoices and I feel my cheeks flush. Surely she can’t know? Thought I have always suspected that both she and my father can see everything. “Gather round everyone.” My mother calls out as my father rings his wine glass.

“Before we sit down to eat- how about a game, before dinner?” My father announces. “Something I picked up while travelling. It’s silly and harmless. It’s about cards – exciting, I know—” He goes on. “Annella, sit down, darling!! You’re making me worry, walking up and down all the time, love.” My mother laughs softly and shushes him. “As I say: we sit around the table, you put the card to your lips and hold it there, and then turn to the person to your left and pass the card to them without using your hands. It’s fun, it’s about unity, it’s risky. The aim is to complete a set...So: Annella to my left-I pass to you, the you pass to Oliver, Oliver to Elio, Elio to Marzia, and Marzia to me and that’s a full circle. Simple, no?” He titters to himself, dealing the cards out of the elastic band that keeps them together. Oliver catches my eye with a mischievous, brief smile. I blink at him, taking in the shape of his cheeks and his nose in the dim light. Marzia nudges my leg to get my attention and begins talking about the disco a few nights ago. I nod and make noises when I think I should but I’m barely listening. It’s hard to concentrate with Oliver in the room.

“And Chiara, of course! Right, Oliver?” Marzia offers an olive branch to him. He blushes almost, taken aback by the remark. “She had a fun night.” She grins honestly, thinking she’s telling an engagingly risqué story.

“Oh, really, Oliver? You didn’t say.” My mother chimes in.

“I-uh—didn’t think it was that relevant to our work.” He answers, lost for words for the first time in a while.

“Ah, but it’s part of the experience! We want to give you the best time in Italia!” She continues supportively. My father joins in having selected the cards.

“Okay!” He clears his throat. “Let’s play.”

I must just suck it up. I can’t leave now, but every fibre of my being wants to be somewhere else. My father places the card to his lips and holds it there for a moment to steady himself, clearly adept at the game through practice. He intended to invoke strategy regardless. He passes it to my mother seamlessly and she turns carefully to pass it to Oliver, almost dropping it but he swoops his head to catch it. In the process, he knocks the card from her lips and perfectly accidentally, they kiss. They hold it for a moment before they realise what’s happened and my stomach sinks. Oliver shrugs it off and picks the card up with his teeth, passing it to me with a straight face. I push it up against his cheek to kiss the card to continue the game, to the cheer of “Well played, Elly” from my father. I pass the card to Marzia with careful pressure, feeling her blush. She quietly completes the circle and the game begins again. I am already tired of it. The cycle becomes quicker and almost practiced the second time around, but I drop it as I pass it to Marzia, flustered by the feeling of Oliver’s warm lips on mine through the card. She laughs shyly and confidently carries on, accidentally pecking Father on the cheek when she finishes round two. The excitement wanes slowly as we can all hear the clattering sound of Mafalda cleaning pans in the kitchen behind us. Father continues, optimistic and tireless. He holds my mother’s hand and kisses the card to her with practice. She, again, successfully passes it to Oliver and then smiles in celebration, enjoying the simple reality that my father is enjoying. Oliver looks at me like he’s trying to say something, as he’s sucking the card against his lips. I look at him in confusion and it makes him laugh. He exhales without intending to and, panicking, he presses his mouth to mine as quickly as he can; careless of the circle. The card is caught between our lower lips and it feels like everyone is looking at us. Marzia almost giggles next to me, giddy by proxy. I’m frozen and Oliver knows he can’t react without explaining further. He pulls away from me and laughs for effect. I catch the card between my teeth as he does.

“I’m not very good at this game.” Oliver chirps, taking a sip of wine. “Sadly, kissing’s not a skill I use a lot as a philologist.”

“Chiara disagrees.” Marzia mumbles to me, smiling joyfully. My forced smile passes her by this time. I pass her the card as I hold it between my smile. She bites the corner and completes the circle the same way. The mood becomes peculiar to me. Blissfully, we’re saved by Mafalda storming in. My mother stands and insists she’ll help set the table.

Dinner is served.

Over the next few minutes, Mafalda and my mother wander out with plates and wine bottles, Mafalda carries a large pot with her. Whatever she’s cooked, it’s pleasant relief from the mounting tension that father’s game is conjuring.

We eat mostly in peace broken by polite conversation, but I feel odd and can’t put my finger on why. I’ll smile without meaning it and reply when asked questions but say nothing by choice.

“Elio, you’ve been quiet.” My father notes aloud. Oliver touches my foot with his after my father says this to reassure me.

“I’d like to say something…”

“Yes, darling?” My mother answers for the table.

“I think I’m—“ Oliver lifts his leg up to the front of my chair and drags his toes down my inner thigh to my foot. “—I’m about to be sick.” I spit out and bolt up from my chair. Oliver looks at me, crestfallen and confused. I turn on my heels and rush out. I can hear a quiet confusion erupt behind me as I run up the stairs to my room. Mafalda loudly scorns me for something and my mother disagrees diplomatically.

“Should I go and check on him?” Marzia asks with concern.

“Don’t worry yourself, Marzia. It’s likely nerves about playing for Mounir and his husband tomorrow.” My father remains peaceful and aware that I’m not sick or anything close. “More wine, Oliver?” He offers. Having shaken his beliefs in the last days and weeks he knew to be true, Oliver declines. 

“No, thank you, Sami.” He swallows what wine he has left. “I might go out and get some air, if you’ll excuse me.”

“Of course: go!” – “Always in such a hurry.” He muses. “But, thank you for joining us, Marzia; it’s been lovely to see you. We know you’re good friends with Elio.” Oliver sneaks upstairs as my father waxes.

A knock comes at my door.

“Elio?” A pause. “Are you alright?” I can almost hear him breathing.

“Come in.”

“Are you alright – did I frighten you?”

“No—of course not.” I sit up straight in bed. “I wanted to tell them, proudly. I could feel myself about to burst---and something caught in my throat.”

“Did you mean that – what you said?”

“Sorry—“

“Do I sicken you?”

“God, no-Oliver! I didn’t mean it— I just wanted to make an excuse to leave after I choked. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. How could you sicken me---you are beautiful and I want to be with you all the time-----”

“Elio—please.” Oliver cuts me off. “Be quiet.” He goes to the bathroom and turns the taps of the bath on. He plays with the hem of my shirt and asks with kindness. “May I?” I’ve made him fragile, my Gideon.

He lifts my shirt off with gentle hands, and then undoes my trousers and slides them off. I’m captivated by his gentle touch: some care he can’t speak, so he shows me.

“That’s enough talking for once day.” He walks me to the bath and leaves me beside it with a gentle kiss on the head. “When you’re ready. Come to bed.” He murmurs into my hair. “And bring your guitar, pesca”.

“Okay.” I whisper and sink into the water.

The hot water holds me still, like Oliver’s hands. I pull my head under it for a brief moment of swelling peace, wishing I could be with him right now.

I knock gently on his door to stir him. My hair is still damp and I’m wearing just a towel. I imagine Oliver ripping it off me as I push his door open tentatively. He’s lying peacefully, half asleep in bed, holding a cigarette in one hand with his free forearm over his eyes. A dormant lion. He moves his arm from his eyes and shifts his body into almost sitting and beckons me over with curled fingers. ”C’mere, Elio.” He takes a drag from his cigarette. “You didn’t bring your guitar.” He mentions as I sit down.

“I got distracted--” I look up at him. “I can get it?”

“No, no, there’s time for that later. Don’t get up please.” He wraps his arms around me after placing his cigarette between my lips. We lie in each other’s arms. Our legs are tangled. Oliver is in shorts and an unbuttoned shirt, and I’m in the crook of him in a towel.

“This isn’t what I thought you meant.” I murmur drowsily into Oliver’s skin.

“I know! But I want it to feel right for you. Not just do it without thinking, Pesca.” I push myself up on my forearms and look at Oliver’s face to watch him answer. He looks calm with his arm draped across my waist.

“Why do you call me Pesca?” I ask before I can stop myself.

“Don’t you like it?”

“It’s not that, I’d just like to know.”

“Finally! Something you don’t know—“ He smiles at me as he runs his hand through my hair. “I call you it because you’re soft and sweet and because they’re my favourite fruit. I could eat peaches until the day I die and be happy.”

“I thought it was about the juice. How it gets all over you.”

“You can suck the flesh from the stone...” He smiles gently and sucks my earlobe between his teeth. Oliver shifts his weight down the bed and pulls the towel off me with a sharp tug. He places small kisses down my stomach to my hips. “...before it runs down your mouth.” I’m getting hard at the feeling of his hands wrapped around my back and his breath across my skin. He looks up at me with a soft smile and runs his tongue the length of my cock before taking the tip in his mouth. The feeling sends a shiver over my skin and I try not to make a sound, in case we summon Mafalda. He slips his mouth further down and sucks, slowly at first, before moving his head faster. I’m losing breath as I writhe on the spot, craning my neck back to gasp.

“You like that?” He lifts his head up sharply, taking me out of my escalating pleasure.

“Don’t stop.”

“Good.” He kisses me on the lips before sliding back down me. I want to taste more of him: more of me on him.

He sucks his cheeks in hard for a second as he takes the whole of my cock in his mouth, deliberately slowly. He teases me with every motion, but I feel like I’m going to explode from my chest. I let a small moan escape my lips and he looks up at me through his lashes, satisfied. He sucks quicker and lets his cheeks out. Quicker and quicker, the pressure is mounting. I can feel my skin crawling and I reach out and grab his shoulder and his hair all at once, seemingly not in control of my hands. I look Oliver in the eye and bite my lip to keep quiet and I sink my fingers into him. He watches me as he makes me cum and he swallows his work with a pleased smile. He lifts his head up gently and places a hand on my chest to feel my racing heartbeat.

“Can I kiss you?” He watches the sweat collect on my brow and dampen my hair once more.

“Yes, please.” I say, catching my breath. He does. It tastes like salt mostly. I’ve never felt anything like this peace that touches every inch of me.

“Elio——" Oliver starts in hushed tones. “—let’s sleep.”

I kiss the first part of him my lips will touch and catch his chin, feeling my hand find Oliver’s and tangle our fingers in each other’s. I curl up into the hollow of his tall body, as he lies on his side, looking at me affectionately.

“Sogni d’oro (Sweet dreams)”. I whisper into his chest.


	2. A Nosebleed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elio and Oliver shower each other with love and affection.

I spend the morning in the garden, it’s been a few days perhaps. Time has melted in the sun. I surround myself with Oliver in small fleeting moments, but for an hour or two I spend time lying on the grass with Marzia.

Between picking fruits, we read French novellas while lying on our fronts. I tuck strands of her loose hair behind her ear which stops her mid-conversation. She’s never been very good at lying or hiding, so I turn to talking about Chiara’s weekend plans with Marzia instead. I say I might go to the country with them.

We roll onto our backs soon after Marzia loses her place. She laughs it off. My growing disinterest in this pleasant afternoon makes me stand up and take a short wander to the patch of apricot trees. She gets up to join me and I offer her the one I’ve picked, and then pull another off for myself. Something that feels like a headache passes over the back of my eyes and I think nothing of it until I see red dripping on the apricot in my hand. I touch my nose reactively and realise I’m having a nosebleed.

“Excusez-moi, Marzia.” I tell her as I leave, holding my hand to my nose. I flash her my reddening hand as I hurry back to the house. From what I can see behind me, she looks shocked but stays totally still. She’s seen me have nosebleeds before, but not quite so sudden as this one. I drop the bloody apricot as I pace.

When I get inside, I clean my face with cold water and a cloth, and hold my head over the kitchen sink, waiting for it to stop. It does and I pour myself a glass of water, wandering with it up to my room to lie down for a moment. Or, accidentally, the whole afternoon.

-

I’m roused by the sound of heavy feet in the room next door. I check my watch and discover that I’ve been asleep for about 5 hours.

“Elio?” Oliver calls softly through the bathroom door at me.

”Yes?” I answer sleepily.

“Marzia came by to see you a few hours ago, wailing about a nosebleed. But you were asleep, so I suggested she not disturb you.” Oliver appears in the doorway and smiles. He comes and sits on the edge of my bed, stroking my leg with the back of his hand. “Are you alright?”

“I’m a mess. But they’re nothing really. I got hit in the nose with a tennis ball almost a year ago and, well, that just happens from time to time.”

“Surprise!” He jokes gently and I chuckle. He picks up my feet, one at a time, and massages them as he talks to me. “Your nose never broke, then?” He enquires, tipping my head slightly left and right with a finger against my cheek.

“No, not quite. It gave me a bad headache though, for two or three days.”

“I’m not surprised! And it’s called a concussion, darling.” He teases me.

“Shut up!” I groan at him and he breaks into a smile, seduced by his own charm.

“When Marzia came by, she brought you this. I said I’d give it to you when I saw you.” He shows me his open palm with a blood-stained apricot. “A nice gesture.”

“Does she think I’ll eat it or something?”

“She didn’t say, she doesn’t really talk to me.”

“I don’t want it.” I shrug. “Just put it on the balcony, let the birds at it.”

“I’ll eat it.” Oliver comments.

“No, don’t.”

“Why not? It’s just a little blood…” He teases me and pretends to lick the apricot.

“Please don’t.” I ask. “I’ll fight you for it, now I want it---”

“I could eat it.” He goads me and shifts just out of my reach before I scramble up.

“—give it back—or throw it away!” I wrestle with him and he pulls me over on top of him, laughing. I hear the apricot hit the floorboards, having rolled off the bed.

“Fine—fine! I give in. You can keep your bloody apricot.” He breathes heavily, looking up at me in awe. We linger in peace for a long moment. “Would you like to go with me and dance this evening?” He offers. “I know a little backstreet bar with a patio and a little disco corner. I think you’d like it. It’ll make you feel better.”

“Yes.” I catch my breath over him. “I’d like that a lot.” I mumble to him, sinking into the soft caress of his hands pinned under my hands.

“Then I’ll see you later.” He utters softly, squeezing my fingers as he does. “Get some rest.” He rolls over holding onto me, so we’re momentarily lying on our sides facing each other. “I’ll see you by the old fountain at nine.”

-

By quarter to ten, we’re full of music and wine and punch and joy. Hiding in the shadows in the trees at the back of this tiny little bar Oliver has brought us to. We’ve danced out of the lights, down onto the grass. We bump into the garden’s low wall and fold-over laughing. “Love My Way” by The Psychadelic Furs comes on and Oliver tears off up the shallow, shadowed embankment to dance to it alone. He looks like an artwork, catching the light. Full of life and knows exactly who he is. I admire him and love him all at once. Everything about him seduces me and I feel myself start to laugh as I realise this in the heady, reflective glow of the dancefloor lights mingling with the moon. He dances for the whole song, gesturing me up to join in. I do after half of the song and dance beside him. Not too close as to cause suspicion but enough to know it matters to me. The song falls away from around our ears as he brushes my hip with his hand and makes a sign with his hands to suggest we leave. It’s late, or it feels it, and Mama will be worrying. I nod in agreement and we shuffle our way back through the tiny bar, full of chairs. 

We emerge outside and he offers me a cigarette from the pack in his top pocket.

“Thanks.” I say. He lights his own and then leans close to me and lights mine, blowing me a kiss with the cigarette caught between his lips still.

“Come on.” He gestures and starts walking away from the disco bar. He’s quick at first, until we turn the second corner and we close in on the town square where he slows right down. We stand under the streetlight in the square, close enough to touch. This is something quiet that is ours. Some humble adoration of each other. He tips his paper cup to me and I toast him. We swallow our last mouthfuls of white wine triumphantly. Oliver chases his mouthful with a sweet punch he’s holding.

A car passes and panics me. I pull Oliver with me as I scramble into the dimness of the nearest alleyway. Out of sight and in a world of our own.

“What if that’s Mafalda driving past— no, she’ll worry if she sees me out after my nosebleed: maybe she’s come to find me! She’s worried out her mind—-“ I blurt out, giddy and wandering the edge of temptation. I pull his shirt sleeves and Oliver closes in on me. He presses me into the welcome darkness of an alcove, halfway down this alley off the square. I breathe heavily into his chest, it’s as though I’m about to fall off the edge of the earth. He darts his eyes left and right down the alley before confirming it is empty.

“Pesca-” Oliver whispers to me. “Are you happy that I came?” I stammer out.

“Yes.” He speaks against my lips before he kisses me indulgently. Like he wants to consume me and I him. In the darkness of this alley off the square, lit by infrequent passing cars and the indirect glow of a streetlight, we devour each other. We kiss with a hunger that makes us cannibals. I moan into his mouth and fit myself everywhere I can touch on him. I’m delirious with wine and lust, it feels like. And suddenly I push him off me before throwing up in the street; narrowly missing Oliver’s shoes. He looks at me as I heave, he’s as out of breath as I am. If anyone could see us, you’d think we were about to die.

“If you keep doing that, I’m going to start thinking you don’t like me.” He jokes as he catches his breath, offering me whatever punch cup is in his hand. I take a greedy mouthful and spit most of it out, to clear the taste out of my mouth. “I thought you Italians could handle your wine.”

“I’m half Italian.” I joke, grinning. I feel foolish and cut open, until, all of a sudden, I don’t. Because I catch the eye of the man looking back at me and I couldn’t feel safer. 

I lift myself up off my haunches and touch my fingers to his.

“Can we go home now?”

He nods and offers me a piggyback. “This’ll make the first bit easier. Only until we’re out of town though!” I hop uneasily up onto his shoulders and wrap my legs around his waist as tight as I can muster. He walks like he’s not even picked me up and carries me out of the square. He strokes my leg as he walks.

“Take a glass of water to bed with you, you’ll thank me in the morning.” He says, looking up at the waxing moon. “Come on, off you get. We’re out of town so you walk from here.” I untangle myself from him.

“You mean you’re not coming with me?”

“In the state you’re in? You need sleep, not the gentle caress of a handsome man.” He’s sincere as he holds my hand, running his thumb across my knuckles. “Believe me: I want to. So ——-“ He kisses me like a butterfly. “—much.”

“I want to touch every inch of you.” I tell him and I squeeze his fingers.

“But, until you’ve slept this wine off; we’ll play it cool.”

“Do you think my parents know?”

“Would it matter if they did?”

“I don’t know.” He lets my uncertainty fall to the sound of our footsteps on the road. After a curious pause, Oliver asks:

“Will you play for me, tomorrow?”

“Play what? That infuriating card game my father made us play at dinner?”

“No, Elio—” He laughs, rolling his eyes as he recalls the game like he also didn’t enjoy it. “Guitar.”

“Why?” I’m curious.

“I like to hear the strings vibrate under your fingers. And think of us, in the grass or in bed. Together.” His answer is more honest that I expected, I suspect this honesty is motivated by the alcohol in his system that’s handling like a true professional. “I like hearing you play music, it’s like hearing you speak but with different words. It feels like you, but only for me.”

I stop in my tracks and Oliver stops a pace ahead of me.

“Oliver, do you mean it?”

“Every word.”

I approach him and, for the first time, I kiss him first with meaning. I kiss him to replace words in my mouth and hope he understands. I hold him still where he stands, wanting this feeling of him kissing me back to last long into the night. He teases my lip with his teeth and I laugh, suddenly, easing back.

“Sorry—" He apologises softly, for me only.

“It’s okay, I wasn’t expecting it.”

“Well, how about, next time I’ll bite mine first and then you’ll know?”

“Don’t break the skin, albicocca.” I murmur, unaware of what I’m saying.

“Albicocca? I see.” He muses with a smile. “Isn’t that a bit small?” He teases and digs his fingers into my ribs. I try and do the same to him and he pulls me back in for a lasting embrace.

“I wouldn’t know.” I offer.

“Come and find me in the morning. When you hear the shower.” He smiles wide. “It’ll wake us both up.”

We walk back hand-in-hand the whole way and sneak inside the house as quietly as we can. We make it up the creaky stairs with foolish ease and reach the first floor. Oliver pushes me up against his bedroom door for a deep, slow kiss. He fumbles with the door handle as he kisses me and it falls away from behind me. I fall into his room and he follows me in quickly enough to catch my arm and stop me from hitting the floor. I stumble into his catch and he smiles brightly at me. He picks me up with an arm around my waist and walks me back to his door with a daisy chain of soft kisses. Without meaning to, I’m sure, Oliver slams his door closed by leaning me against it again. I feel dizzy and almost weightless as we kiss sloppily. He moans gently into my mouth as I run my hands through his hair. He steadies our weight with his hands flat against the wooden door.

Suddenly, a knock comes on that wood. I’m pressed up against it and the violent sound frightens my swimming head enough that I squeal. My legs grip his waist in surprise. Mafalda heard the slamming, it seems, has come knocking.

“American?” I hear her enquire.

“Shhh.” He whispers to me and I bury my head in his shirt neck. “Si, Mafalda?” He announces, trying to sound quiet.

“Are you okay? I heard noise.”

“I’m fine, Mafalda. Sorry to wake you. I dropped a book.” I stifle a laugh and kiss his neck as he answers her. “Thhh—thank you. I’m good.” His voice catches and he sinks his hand into my hair.

“Okay. Buona notte (Good night), American.” We listen to her footsteps.

“Why does she never remember your name?” I query against his neck.

“It’s Oliver.” He murmurs to her but mostly to me. “Come here, pesca.” He asks, pulling at the collar of my shirt and kissing my neck. “Let’s get you what you _need_.” He sings against my skin. I’m delirious with a mixture of lust and fatigue. He’s making me swim. I feel him hard beneath me as he leads me into my bedroom through our shared bathroom. “Hmm, Elio?” He queries softly when he lays me down on the bed with his weight on mine. His cock grazes mine as he sits over me. I’m grinning giddily. He teases me with his hand on my stomach before slinking off me and disappearing for a moment. Maybe he’s planned something? Maybe he’s waiting for me? I undo and fight off my jeans while lying down. I think if I lift my head too quickly, I’ll be sick again.

Over the sound of my rustling, he returns. Holding a glass of water in his hand. My heart falls. I’m aching for his touch. I want to feel him inside me, taste him, hear him, be with him for hours. Forever, I think. And instead, a glass of water.

“Come on, Oliver!” I moan as he places the glass on the table beside my head.

“I told you, Elio. You’re drunk. I’m not sober either… you would regret it. I don’t want to take advantage of you.”

“Albicocca!” I say shortly.

“Curse me all you like with love notes, but, I want you to feel every second of it, Elio. And remember, not lose it into some blur. You deserve to feel it and choose to.” He’s reasonable suddenly, and then pauses on a thought. “Just—don’t go to sleep angry.” I look at him with sleepy eyes.

“Your eyes look like opals.” I tell him thoughtfully. It’s difficult to stay angry at his heart-melting eyes, harder still with a swimming head. I resent that he’s right. it feels like he knows me better than I know myself but that’s just a feeling.

“Yours look like peridot. My favourite color.” He replies and I muster a gentle smile. I take a mouthful of water as he stands to leave. “Good.” He acknowledges my action. “Like I said—” He murmurs, now standing in the bathroom doorway. “Hear the shower. Come for me.” I think he blows me a kiss but I can’t quite tell in the grey light. Almost immediately upon hearing the bathroom door close, I fall asleep.

-

I awake to the sound of distant morning birds. It’s not as late I thought it would be. Nonetheless, I feel slightly behind on the day already. I rub my eyes and listen for the shower as I slowly make sense of the room and the time and the world around me. I don’t hear the shower and suddenly fear that I slept through it. I stumble up out of bed to check if our shared bathroom is wet and it’s not so I can calm myself down. He couldn’t be that cruel.

After a few minutes of carefully redressing myself, I make my way downstairs to the porch for breakfast. My mother has made poached eggs with toast and fresh tomatoes, with fresh apricot juice and espresso. I can smell a lot of it before I reach the back door. I turn the corner to see my mother, father, and Oliver at least half way through a sitting and make my way to the table.

“Ah! There he is!” My father remarks joyfully.

“Good morning, Elio.”

“It looks beautiful, mama.” I say and drink a mouthful of juice, trying to catch Oliver’s eye. He’s blithely looking across the lawn to the copse of trees in the far corner, down towards the old fountain and the path which leads to the river.

“How did you sleep, darling? You look tired.” My mother interjects as I pick up a piece of toast.

“Briefly, but I was restless.” I’m interrupted by Oliver before I can tell a lie.

“Excuse me, Elio-” He steps in to make a scene. “-that was beautiful, Annella; thank you!” Oliver toasts his espresso to us. “I got your note, too, Doctor; I’ll review the new slides this afternoon.” He swallows the rest of his drink in one mouthful, glancing over at me. “It’s a bit hot so I might take a shower.” He announces nonchalantly, smiling politely. I feel my stomach twist and I try to think of an excuse to follow.

“What are you up to today, Elio?” My mother asks to continue the conversation as Oliver leaves.

“Music, I think. I have a bit of writing I’d like to do.” I fumble.

“For Mounir?” My father suggests with a soft smile. “As an anniversary gift, don’t you think, Annella?”

“Yes, darling! Oh, they so loved you playing for them on Friday. We were so proud of you.” I feel myself smile as I look over at my parents.

“I might take this upstairs actually, start early.” I finish the small glass of apricot juice I’ve been toying with and kiss my parents on the head as I make my way away from the breakfast table, carrying a poached egg and a spoon with me. I smile plainly at Mafalda as I pass her.

“Che piacere vederti (What a pleasure to see you), Mafalda! Did you sleep well?”

“Ciao (Hello), young Elio.” She mumbles. I smile and carry on walking upstairs. I hurriedly set down the eggcup and spoon and pull my shirt off over my head as I run into the bathroom to the sound of the shower turning on.

“You’re late, slowpoke.” Oliver hums at me. I don’t take it in, I’m too busy tearing my clothes off. “How’s your head?” He asks quietly, watching me as I watch the water pouring over his naked body. He’s more tanned than I expected, both soft and hard. He’s well-shaved and smells like divine soap from my short distance away. He’s gorgeous.

“Let me show you.” I promise with a smile.

“In a moment—” He clarifies with a soft chuckle. “How’s your head feeling?”

“It’s better, thank you.” I get into the shower with him.

“Good.” 

Something electric between us pulls us together almost instantly. His hands run over my back and mine wrap around his neck and waist. I can feel his skin on mind and it’s maddening.

“I’ve been waiting for this for so long.” He whispers in my ear. I slick my hair back and Oliver pushes me carefully to lean on the tiled wall. The temperature change makes me shiver. “Sorry it’s cool.” He whispers to me, smiling.

I can’t think straight. Every touch is his. He slips his hand across my stomach and it tickles under the stream of water pouring over us. He kisses his way down my chest as he strokes my hard cock.

“Lean back. I want to see you.” I murmur to him and he does. I leave one arm hooked around his neck but draw the other to touch his throbbing erection. He grins and water splashes all over his teeth. I push his soaking hair out of his eyes and he thanks me. I kiss him quickly as I grip his cock and stroke. I hear him gasp and I loosen my touch slightly. I concentrate on his breathing and his quiet moan and instructions as I fall into a delirium at his fingertips. At the same time, he tightens his fingers and I catch my breath in my throat as he spits on his hands and grips my cock again. He reaches a hand up and plays with my nipple and I feel like I’m going to cum.

“Harder.” He whispers with longing and I agree. I gasp and kiss his cheek harshly.

“Ssss-slow, now.” I ask. I can feel my stomach knotting. His new slower hold makes me stand on my tiptoes.

“Go faster with me?” He suggests with a low growl, nipping at the shell of my ear. I want to scream.

I close my eyes and throw my head back against the wall. Quickly, I cum all over his leg. I listen to him panting in my ear, holding out for a little longer. He groans into my neck, pushing his lips against my skin, I can feel it vibrate. “Elio.” I swear I hear him moan before he cums over my stomach. The water washes it off before I can touch it.

Like mine, Oliver’s breathing is ragged and covered by the sound of the splashing shower water. We’re dirtier than we were when we got in and heaving for breath. He leans his forehead against the wall beside me and closes his eyes for a second, taking it in. He turns his head and I adore his glowing smile. He wipes the water from his eyes and places his hand around my ear and neck, cradling my face. I can’t keep my smile down.

“That was…..incredible.” He kisses me softly, holding onto the high while it lasts. “I can’t begin to imagine what sex will be like with you. The thought alone makes me hard.” He turns off the water and runs his fingertips across my stomach. He steps out of the shower and I run my eyes over him for the first time, properly; studying every curve and cut of his naked body. He watches me staring at him and replies, offering me a towel with an outstretched hand. “You’re not so bad yourself.” He smiles and I step out, embarrassed suddenly for staring. “Hey-” He notices me fold over myself. “—don’t blush and crumple up, Pesca. Every art work needs to be appreciated. We’re our own sculptors. Look all you like now, I’ll look different at midnight.” He smirks and I almost drop my towel. “Moonlight doesn’t flatter my tan lines.” Oliver jokes, as he kisses my hair quickly. 

“Oliver?” I stop him as he leaves. “It was.” I break into a large smile at him. He reciprocates as he steps into his room. “Later.” I mock him as I dry myself in the bathroom. I amble into my room and get dressed again before walking out to the balcony and sitting cross-legged on it for ten minutes, feeling the light warm breeze play with my hair. I glance at my watch as I stand up. 11:34. Twelve more hours of blissful ignorance before pure bliss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've translated any phrases in French or Italian that aren't common place in parentheses ().  
> Let me know if it's funky or not. xx


	3. Midnight Season

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> TO BE CONTINUED

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Try "Season" by Elder Island with this.
> 
> Rome will be in the next one.  
> xx

It’s 4 in the afternoon.

I’ve settled atop the hill overlooking the bay with my guitar. Fumbling and thumbing at strings, I muse. I run my fingers across the strings softly. I play him something I’ve been transcribing but not yet finished. Something for piano that I’ve transposed to guitar. It’s Brahms, reimagined. It’s for him.

“That’s beautiful, Elio.” I twang a string in surprise, almost snapping it.

“Oliver!” I jump.

“I thought I’d find you here.” He says. “You left a trail of paper, from your bag; not sure if you noticed.” I turned around fully and saw the small handful of sheet music he was holding. “Marzia came calling for you, just as I was leaving.” He explains. “I said I wasn’t sure where you were, perhaps the fountain.”

“Maybe I should go back and find her.”

“What for?” He asks out of curiousity more than spite. “You’ve not seen her for weeks, why does another hour matter?”

“What if it’s important?” I wonder.

“It wasn’t important, she was wearing sandals and carrying a tennis racket.” He laughs. “We can go back later. Let’s watch the sun set here.” He suggests, as he pats the ground next to him. The grass is almost golden in the fading sunlight. I shift over to him and lean my head against his shoulder.

“How long do we have left?”

“A couple hours. I have to go and run some errands after this.” He tells me.

“I could come with you?” I offer.

“What about Marzia, all of a sudden?”

“You said yourself, it can’t be urgent.” I answer, already having forgotten her presence.

“Don’t be that cruel. Besides; I’d like the break, if it’s all the same to you. The distance makes me want you more.” He says openly, touching my thigh with the back of his fingers. “Play that again, would you?” He closes his eyes as I start to pick at the strings.

“How did you know?” I ask, after long minutes of melody and the gentle rolling of the water.

“Know what?” He replies, knowing exactly what I’m asking.

“What you liked.”

“I love the way you say things, Elio.” He doesn’t answer the question. “I just felt it, in my chest, I was about your age. I was taking a girl to prom-do you have that here? Prom?”

“Not really.”

“It’s a dance, really. But, anyway; I went to her house to pick her up and her brother answered the door. And, I don’t know, he was a year or two older than me, but I wanted to take him too. I shook his hand accidentally. And I tried to ask him whether he wanted to come to prom with me, but he thought I was just asking about Mara. I’d always admired boys, I’d never quite put the pieces together that I liked them too, until then.” He opens his eyes and looks at me. “Why’d you ask?” He enquires.

“Marzia. She makes me wonder if I’ve ever liked girls, or if they’re just convenient and I’m horny enough to say yes.”

“Maybe.” He laughs softly. “Hearing you say ‘horny’ is peculiar, and cute. It feels dangerous for you. You’re too composed to say it.”

“You’re such a cock.” I chide him, leaning away and dropping my fingers from the strings.

“You’ll see tonight.” He teases me, pushing my side. “Once more, with teeth; please.” He asks softly, moving the hand that’s on my thigh to my cheek like a blessing. He places a tiny kiss on the tip of my nose before leaning back and tucking his knees up to his chest and watching me begin to play. I look across to him and then at the frets, trying to stop myself from smiling. “With teeth, Pesca! Like you mean it!” He commands in jest, making himself laugh. The sun drags out every minute and refracts it, and for this half an hour, I couldn’t care less.

-

Dinner was terribly slow because I was just waiting for it to be over. The hour that followed dinner was slower still, and the hour after made my nerves set alight. I was trying to count the stars to stop thinking about Oliver. He wasn’t there at dinner. Would he be there in under an hour? Twenty-four minutes, now. Was he there? I couldn’t hear his feet moving around. A sudden, sinking worry consumed me for at least five minutes until I notice a small piece of paper slide under my bedroom door. I dash to it and unfold it. It reads: ‘Do you want a cigarette?” I place the paper to my lips, savouring it before the curdling in my stomach makes me stand. I pace to the balcony and look out to Oliver’s room, to see him standing there, blue shirt unbuttoned and revealing his bare chest down to his dusk-coloured shorts, buttoned but not belted. He turns to me and smiles, offering me his lit cigarette over the space between us.

Tentatively, I step off my balcony and walk through the bathroom we share and into my old room, onto the balcony beside him. I take a drag of his cigarette and hand it back.

“I’m glad you came.” He utters softly. We’re separated by an arm’s length, easily bridged.

He comes closer and touches me softly: a hand on the small of my back bringing me to him and him to me. Some small closeness that could never be torn into for a moment. I could die here. My heart might explode.

There’s a flit of terror which crosses between my fingers and the cotton of his shirt. Something electric which keeps me quick and stops me from asking questions in case I ask the wrong ones.

“You okay?--” I hear. “You sure?” He checks again.   
I nod and then bashfully spill “Yes” from my mouth, trying not to smile or cry in the same utterance. There’s a peculiar wave of calmness that washes over me having said something out loud. His foot touches mine as he watches me thinking in the crook of him. He feels taller and greater than me by more than usual right now. He’s a God. He’s Gideon, and I want to feel him inside me more than I could put into words. You’ll kill me if you stop now, Oliver.

I touch his pale blue, billowy shirt with my fingertips. I run my hand up the seam, across all of the buttons, until I reach his shoulder. He’s watching me. I slip my hand inside the collar and around the back of his neck with a nervous caress as I push it off his body. I love this shirt, because he wore it the day he arrived. This will always be him to me. This shirt that I’m pulling off him and he’s letting me. I bring my hand back up to his neck and I rub his skin like my fingers are feathers. He beams at me, glancing from my fingers to my face, searching for answers. I look up at him through my eyelashes and catch him looking back. For this first and only time tonight, we freeze. I don’t know what to say or do, suddenly.

He inches closer to me, leaning down, and kisses me. It tastes like a first kiss. It feels like our first, again. It’s soft and heartbreaking and he tastes like fresh fruit. Oliver is slipping his knee between my legs as he runs his hand up my back to pull me into him. I climb closer and wrap my legs around his waist as I throw his shirt off. I reach down between us to undo his shorts.

“Off, off, off, off-” He whispers to me, pulling at my clothes. “-Elio, off.” I can’t move my hands quickly enough. He leans me back and pulls my shorts off, before fighting his own off from under me.

Some mounting, irascible passion bites at my insides as I feel him run his fingertips from my ribs to my thighs. He lies down beneath me and looks at me in awe, looking still when he lets his fingers trace around to the front and insides of my thighs. My skin tingles everywhere he touches. My cock is teasing at my boxers and he couldn’t care less. He’s caught in my starlit eyes: full of fear and anticipation and lust. Fuck me, Oliver – I want to tell him, whisper to him, say something to him – but my mouth falls silent by pressing onto him and sinking into an indulgent, wet kiss. He feels every movement of me on him, all the pressure between us becomes a vacuum and pulls us together like we want to be one person. He moans into my mouth and I’m almost breathless. His throbbing cock beneath mine is driving me wild.

At this great height, I’m light-headed. He wraps an arm around my back and braces us with the other, rolling us over so he’s on top of me.

He kisses me and I almost giggle because his hair is tickling my neck. I squirm and he looks up; concerned, holding himself suspended and totally still.

“I’m okay, it’s okay.” I stammer quietly. “Your hair tickles.” I tell him trying to smile and regain myself.

“You sure?” He presses gently.

“Yes.” I tell him, and myself. “I want to. I want all of you.” I try to hold his hand. I can only brush it with my fingers, and he smiles at me softly. Oliver kisses me on the lips with a smile and whispers in my ear.

“Would you hold my hair back as I go down?” I moan without meaning to and he chuckles before carrying on. He kisses his way to my hip bones and stops to run his fingers tips along the insides of my thighs. I stifle a moan. I keep a hold of his hair as he lifts his head up and slowly moves it down onto my cock. My fingers tighten in his hair and he sucks his cheeks in in response. I can’t stifle the breathy moan when he does. Oliver glides his mouth up and down with equal pressure and speed, slowing down when he feels my thigh muscles trembling against him. I gasp and try not to shout.

“Oliver---please—” ‘You’ll kill me if you stop now’ I think again. He pulls his head up off me and kisses the tip of my cock as he does.

“We’ve got hours, Elio.” He speaks into my stomach. “We’ve got all night.” It’s a promise. He removes my hand from his hair and laces his fingers with mine before taking my throbbing cock into his mouth again. He pushes his tongue flat and takes in the whole length for a brief moment that makes me almost choke on my tongue. I feel his lips curl at the sides as he eases back but sucks harder and faster. I’m close. My feet kick out against the sheets. God, he’s Gideon. He’s godly. He knows exactly what he’s doing to me and it’s making him rock hard. He teases me by sucking softer suddenly but deeper, then hard on the tip.

“Oli—” I hear myself murmur in the heights. He grips my fingers with his. I come in his mouth, harder than I expected.

“How was that for you?” He swallows and asks, jokingly, leaning back to take in the picture of me, breathless and writhing. “Do you want to know what you taste like?” He asks more sincerely. “Can I?”

“Yes.” I admit, trying to sit up. Our hands haven’t come undone yet. He smiles abashedly and leans over to kiss my slowly. I can taste my cum in his mouth. Less sweet than a peach.

His breathing is my metronome for my blossoming, from now on. A soft clock in my ear. I’m soft in the centre of my body, between all my guts and my lungs; I’m melting inside myself. We did it – finally. Tenderly, and on fire, Oliver and I made love for the first time. For my first time. We fucked until we couldn’t breathe. And now, in the silvered moonlight, I’m sleeping in his arms and his legs, and his bed that was my bed and will never again be my bed. It will always be his bed. With the thought of an ending suddenly, that there will be a time when Oliver no longer sleeps here, under my touch or not, my stomach sinks. I concentrate on his breathing and try to forget about any frame to hang this moment in. The moon through the French windows casts his naked, summer-tanned body into a paler glow. More apricot than peach or nectarine. Albicocca of my eye.

He exhales deeply and almost says something in his sleep, but instead shuffles his body without realising. I smile, nestling into his resting, peaceful body. This is the quietest he’s ever been here. My parents would love him like this. Imagine breakfast without his constant witticisms. I couldn’t and don’t want to, so I breathe in the smell of him. The smell of us, all over the sheets. Shampoo and perfume and sweat and spit and cum.

I can’t stop thinking about what he asked me: to “call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine”. It was so simple all along. For weeks of aching and silent communication, the lingering touches, and the trying, the gaps, and the pauses, and the glances and the bitten-off words; all I’d needed to say was “Elio” and I’d hear “Oliver” in response.

I close my eyes next to him and I let myself fall asleep under his touch. I dreamt of this: the lightest, like he held me hours ago, and for all those hours until right now. Held me and kept me still with him. Kept me still on him, with him inside me. Every touch guiding me, every word, though there were few, told me exactly how he was feeling. Every time I heard his name and mine, in some bitten off ecstasy, I felt my heart grow and grow until it could burst from my chest. I was more peach than stone, for the first time in my life. _How could he know me better than I knew myself? What had he learned in the 7 years between us?_ I wanted every inch of him. I couldn’t help but smile at the thought, too fresh to be a memory yet. Too hot to touch. A delicacy of the small hours: Oliver’s hand tangled into my hair as he came over my back. His held-back groan as he pulled my head back. The motion of it all. I dreamt myself awake a few hours later. It’s too hot for the sheets, I decided.

Something about me felt unknown as I tried to fall asleep in the shape of Oliver’s body. I chose not to dwell on it, in case I never slept again. But, I felt different like I thought I wanted to and, in equal part, thought I wouldn’t. I didn’t feel different when I slept with Marzia, last Spring. She was soft and warm to the touch, like Oliver was. She tasted of the sea, where he tasted of nectar and apricot juice. Was it love? Or just some sinking feeling?

Eventually, I rest in his arms. He’s blissfully unaware of my waking. I peck his shoulder as I close my eyes again. With sleep comes rest, with which comes the dawning sunlight in a few hours time. We’re washed in it, before we’re washed in the shower. I kiss him on the cheek when I wake up and look over him. Blissful and calm, a statue in bed almost. A work of sheer beauty, succumbing to my whimpers and touches only a few short hours ago. He smiles at me like he’s found something he’s been searching for. There’s no trick in his expression for once, he’s telling me the truth without saying a single word.

“Good morning, Oliver.” He murmurs to me.

“You look beautiful, Elio.” I tell him, sincerely and in awe.

“Better now?” He asks seductively, pulling the sheet that’s barely covering us off the bed with his outside hand. Our naked bodies glow in the sunlight. I smile at him and he smiles back at me. “We’d better get up.” He says, leaning down to hold my face in his hand. We kiss fiercely, like we’d both love nothing more than to sprawl over the other and adore each and every ounce of the other. I want to feel myself inside of him. He wants to blow me on the balcony. I want to go back to where we started and kiss him for hours before coming in his mouth. He wants to feel me inside of him while we holds hands. Then, suddenly, I want to disappear. Only for the shortest moment. But, that thought crosses the back of my closed eyes. It slows me down and makes me flinch. I lean up off him and hold my arms out against his chest.

“We’re going to be late for breakfast, Albicocca.” I say, trying to tease him.

“Oh, Pesca…” He whispers playfully. “-you wouldn’t dare.” He hasn’t noticed, I don’t think.

We lean together as we clamber up off the bed and meet for a soft, passing kiss as I quietly walk to the bathroom and turn the shower on. The water stings as it runs over me. I watch Oliver join me, minutes later, to splash water on his face.

“I want the apricot juice to taste like you.” He wishes aloud. I flush under the water and reach out to touch his face, letting my thumb rest on his lower lip. I want to capture this moment before it disappears.

-

Like penetration, a sharp pain becomes a dull ache over time. But there was no teasing or easing with this one, no foreplay, no promises, no lubrication. An ache grew in my chest like my blood was spoiling inside my heart. Like I could feel myself with all of my fingers, but they fell through the form they touched. Now, only the ache existed; I was just the body it stayed in.

Barely 6 months have passed, but I was young and pale in the sun still. It was a colder sun, now, or so it seemed since Oliver had left. It was almost February, but the cold still bit at my heels if I took a night walk or lingered on his balcony for too long. It could never be mine again, for it was his once. So, then, it should be ours; like we shared it, like it contained a part of him. But that thought made me sad some nights.

When the sadness runs across my skin like water, in his absence, I found myself wondering one night if Oliver’s heart was his stone. All apricots have one. I wondered where his was. Where mine was. Whether he could rip mine out of me like I wanted to sometimes. But, like rain, sadness passes. It leaves a greyness in its wake. August, September, October: all painted grey.

Rome and Bordighera held traces of him. I held these traces, and yet, he was nowhere to be found. ‘I’ve loved you’, I remind myself. I felt the whole of your touch on my skin like electricity.

And I don’t feel swallowed whole by the moonlight that covers me in bed.

Two days after this, precisely 6 months and 6 days since Oliver left Rome and me behind with it; he rang our house. I didn’t even hear it ring. I was in the shower. It was later afternoon, almost evening.

“Elio!” I heard, shouted from downstairs.

“Che vuoi? (What do you want?)” I shout back, spitting through the water.

“Elio, it’s Oliver!” My mother shouts again. My heart skips a beat. I turn off the water and

“Two minutes—” I offer back, scrabbling about for clothes or a robe. I scramble into my room and grab the first thing I can from my wardrobe. I pull on some swimming shorts, hanging on the back of the door and an oversized blue shirt from the nearest hanger. It’s only as I almost fall down the stairs that I realise I’m wearing Oliver’s shirt. That shirt. His shirt.

“It’s Oliver, he’s on the phone.” My mother says again, handing me the receiver as she catches the light leave my eyes slightly. Only the phone.

“Oh-“ I utter, trying to force a soft smile for her. She grins at me as she passes me a towel for my hair. I lift the handset up to my ear and hear my father’s voice first.

“I cannot believe it’s a sunny as you say it is, Oliver. You won’t make me jealous. I have peace and a study, I don’t need your American winter sun---” He laughs lightly, Oliver returns it softly.

“Hello?” I interrupt without thinking.

“Oh—Eli, I heard you tumbling downstairs. I’ll leave the rest to you, then.” My father says. “It’s been a pleasure talking again, Oliver. You must call more often.”

“Oh, I will, Sami. Don’t you worry—” Oliver trails off. He sounds exactly the same, just further away than he ever has.

“We’ve kept him warm for you, Eli.” My father quips, knowing exactly what he’s saying, as he hangs up his receiver. I hear the click on my end. It’s just us now. Who speaks first? Who caves?

“So, do we speak or, do we di---” Oliver chirps, almost nervously.

“Please don’t say that.” I have to cut him off. “ It’s been so long. Don’t start like that, please. My heart can’t take it.” I find myself getting quieter the more that I say.

“Sorry.” He’s short but there’s care there still. He just doesn’t know what to say for the first time in months. “I don’t know how to start again.” I want to say something to him, anything. I leave a space between us for all the words I’ve been trying to shake out of my head for months.

“It’s like learning to talk again, isn’t it?”

“It is.” He agrees, almost sombrely. “And what’s baby’s first word?”

“Albicocca.” I tell him after a frightening pause. I’m sure he can hear my swallowing down the line.


	4. Rattlesnakes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After half a phone call, Oliver returns for Christmas a year later.

I lingered by the phone like he’d just touched it. I waited, still and hoping to turn to stone. There comes a stab at my stomach that feels like I might be sick which I feel run all the way up my throat and into the back of my mouth. I run out into the garden and breathe heavily. My nose is bleeding down my mouth and I heave my head over my arms which are bracing my knees. I spit as hard as I can, trying my hardest to avoid adding a different memory to the pale blue shirt.

Despite the blood, I feel sick.

I am feeling the unbearable pain of being both remembered and forgotten all at once. It terrifies me the more I dwell on it. I remember Oliver whispering “Oliver” in my ear between soft kisses, waking me up as we’re wrapped up in each other, like those months between us have been erased all of a sudden. I want to feel the heat of his fingers on mine, not just the memory of it. I want him here, with me, again. I want to taste him: eat him up, mouthful by mouthful. Take a bite of him, like I could devour him and, in consuming him, make him stay.

Soft flesh, pale in the sunlight. “When will the fruit trees start to grow again?” I wonder in lament as I glance up before throwing my head forward. I heave like I’m going to be sick on the cold dewy grass, but all that comes out is drops of blood running down my lips.

“Elio—” I tell myself, quietly. “-you are more of me than I had ever been.”

This dispossession of myself gives me a moment to pause, out of body and mind, a deathless life for all of a minute. I’ve never felt so clear-headed, something has fallen or shifted within me.

“It’ll be alright.” He tells me without using my name and I don’t find any comfort in it.

Exactly 6 months before this moment, he’s leaving. We’re standing on a gently busy train platform, waiting for the 4:40 to Rome, but resenting its arrival. We’re quiet, for the first time in a long time.

“Do we speak or do we die?” He asks as he’s about to step onto the train. We’re inches away from each other and minutes away from our last, hasty kisses in the shaded alcove at the back of the empty waiting room. I graze my fingertips across the back of his hand and he doesn’t flinch. I choke in my throat because I want to say so many things and can’t spit any of them out. There’s not enough time.

We’ve seen this moment playing out in our minds for the hours preceding it’s happening. Some wordless version or other of these events, little vignettes from silent movies that all inevitably have the same sad ending. Perhaps we’re wrong, when we daydreamt it, that it would end sadly? This is just a pause, we could think. We, with our shared mind and heart. Very funny.

We’ve been forged in Rome, brought to life to a degree that I didn’t think was possible or know to be true before. I felt like I didn’t touch a single stone I walked on, I was lighter in my bones, I had no worries or fears because I knew no one here and no one knew me. I was a perfect stranger, save for the man who’s hand I held as we walked. We feasted and drank and toasted every night like it could well be the end of the world. If it was to be, at least we’d fall into it wrapped in each other’s arms. Like two venomless snakes, wrapped up in each other. We could die here, such were the highs and the absent lows of this city. Every day built on the last night, creating a pattern of lust and fever that was only dampened by midnight runs, stripped into the sea, screaming to the Gods: ‘this is ours’. We were swelling with a second blood we shared, a touch from the moon that meant we needed little sleep. Surely this was like a drug?

I was sure, at least, that I was dependent on Oliver. Addicted to his smell and the feather-brush of his touches. To his weight and his hands and the way he’d lean his head into the curve between my ear and my collarbone and call me by his name. I could burst with songs and praises for Oliver’s sun-enriched complexion whenever he’d lean out of the shallow balcony into the moonlight beyond. He was in a black and white movie for me and me alone. This love, this lover; could never end. Could, but wouldn’t.

And now, I say nothing and want to say everything. Setting off the pause that would last six achingly long months, to be broken only by a brief flit of a phone call, before restoring itself to peace between us for a year afterwards. It would be next Christmas before I saw you again, but how was I to know that now? I don’t think even you knew. I don’t think it was premeditated, though it was a murder of sorts; I just think life got in the way. Life withered us in ways we’d not realise until we saw each other’s face’s again that next Christmas.

-

“Ciao, American!” Mafalda welcomes him with spindly, open arms. Anchise too, but with a more stern handshake. My mother comes to life with his arrival, she exudes a joy I haven’t seen since the leaves started changing colour. He has brought this, at least. He warmly pulls my father into a huge hug, losing his shorter frame in his chest and shoulders. This same warmth extends as he smothers my mother with kisses left and right. He’s giddy as a fool in love. And then, as he must, he reaches me. I’ve been lingering at the back of the group, watching like I’m not here. I’m frightened by the forced realisation that I am and must now act the part. Oliver’s eyes are bright as he takes in the sight of me for a lingering second, I instinctively beam at him, he looks thoroughly unchanged at this distance. He wraps his arms around me, holding my body close to his in an immediately different way than he did to my father. I feel swaddled by his new smell and the plush cotton of his expensive, clearly gifted shirt. Our arms form a reflective reach for each other’s shoulders and waist, like an upright lover’s cradle. But the moment is cut short by formality.

“You got tall!” He expresses, squeezing my shoulder affectionately, fleetingly meeting my gaze before swivelling on his heels to pick up his bags and carry them upstairs against Mafalda’s protestations. Anchise, by this point, has disappeared. It suddenly feels more like Christmas now he’s arrived. Last Christmas without him looks hollow in my memory, like a house with no lights on. I flinch from this thought, following him with his last bag up the stairs, ready to correct him on which room is his. I explain that we’re the wrong-way-around this time, he’s in my old room and I’m in his, that is in fact mine but it’s since been his in my mind. He nods receptively and appreciates the view of his new surrounding, surely immediately familiar with the place he spent so much of his time in that Summer.

I set his bag down in the lip of the doorway. A silence splits us in two again, like we were never a whole; or a pair, or two halves of a fruit wrapped around the stone. It’s never ending seconds like this exact one which, over the months, make me question if we _were_ ever anything other than a fancy of my imagination. I can’t ask him to prove to me that it wasn’t a dream when we’re like this. Maybe later, after midnight, when he loiters on the balcony in what-was-my-room as I lie in my room that used to be his. He interrupts my wanton, wishing train of thought with his soft but harsher-edged voice.

“It’s strange. That’s what I haven’t missed the most.” I didn’t expect Oliver to be so upfront. Troubled a little, I begin to doubt what I knew for the longest time. “The silences when we’re standing up.” He murmurs with an inherent dullness that could be mistaken for disinterest. I think he’s just getting his accent back.

“You were the best parts of me, I thought, and when you left me on that platform in Rome you took them with you. All the petals from this blossom, bloomed in your hands and crushed by your fingers into your palm.” It feels stupid to pour it all out like I’m sicking my deepest fears all over his lovely new outfit, worn especially for my parents. Honesty like bile stings at the back of my throat. I had to tell him, I justify to myself. I needed him to know, if it’s the last thing I say to him. This vomit-of-sorts puts pay to the daydream of us approaching on the balcony, dressed in moonlight and its decadent shadows. Oliver raises his hand to touch my shoulder, after a long minute of considering my words. He thoughtfully skims his touch down the length of my arm until he reaches my wrist. He makes a ring around it with two fingers and his thumb, like he is a watch or a cuff around me, turning my hand up to face him. He resists moving too quickly but it seems to be over before I realise. He lifts my hand by my wrist to his face and places a brief kiss into my palm, looking up at me through his lashes which feel to have gotten longer over the year and a half away. I’ve grown, he must have noticed, that he has to look up to me like I once did to him. He doesn’t let this knowledge bother his soft but hasty crumpling of my fingers into my palm, using the fingers of his other hand. He makes my hand holding the kiss into a fist and wraps his hand over it momentarily before letting go of me completely.

It feels like a perverse, childish game and his saying nothing more about it make it all the more maddening. The symbolism doesn’t pass me by but I don’t know what he means, what he wants from this moment. Is this it? After a year apart, a kiss to take with me wherever I go. Like a coin in my pocket that I can flick into a wishing well and want for more.

Briefly, the thought flies across my mind that this was a Christmas present and somehow I hate it all the more. Not because I want items particularly, but if it was planned it didn’t feel it and that’s what stings. I can’t shake the feeling of my being a sentimental afterthought of Oliver’s time in this house all of a sudden. It itches at my skin all night.

I don’t see him around the next day. He vanishes into town to look around and see the same sights he has already seen. I feel meticulously avoided by him. I, in turn, take a long, freezing walk down to the sea and along the beach, hoping that my own self-imposed isolation will counteract his ignoring me. I’m quiet at dinner that night and most of the day after. Oliver lingers around us, having no reasonable excuse to disappear at this stage, but he is bathed in the love of my parents as they spend most of the afternoon asking him about his life in the last year, his work. I spend over half of the day in the kitchen, helping Mafalda cut vegetables and sprinkle sugar over pastries.

Another dinner comes and I am politely quiet as it washes over me. That evening, I play as I am asked to but I don’t follow it with any witty conversation. Oliver tries and I make an effort to respond jovially, like my mind isn’t stuck in quicksand elsewhere, but I assume he sees right through me (along with everyone else).

I’m so distracted by this sinking thought that the glint of my father’s glass and wristwatch catching the light looks angelic, almost, beckoning me out of this creeping despair. He looks at me with a gentle smile and waves towards himself, gesturing for me to follow him out to the breakfast table. I come to, hazily, and oblige, rising from the dent I’ve made in the sofa on the other side of the room. I don’t notice Oliver look to my father when he summons me, nor do I catch my mother’s eye flit from me to Oliver to my father with concern at my quietness. I hear polite conversation spark up as I leave the room and assume it is exactly because of this that it occurs. It doesn’t once cross my mind that it’s a cover, a crutch, to stop my mother crying out quietly at my feet and asking where her son has gone. What has stolen him and haunts these halls in his shape? I just walk out, ignorant and unblissful.

“Eli-belly.” My father mumbles in his warm, fireside voice, putting his arm around me and pulling into a deep, comforting hug. He rests his glass on my opposite shoulder. “You seem not yourself today.” My bones feel thawed and more present after it. “If you are lost, and even if you’re not, you know you can always talk to me.” His kind heart reverberates through his chest and into mine. He lets his hint hang in the cold night air before he lets me go. His offer feels like an arm reaching into the quicksand to pull me out, an arm that could not possibly fail to help.

“I know, pa.” I murmur, apologising in a way. “I’ve just had something weighing on my mind. A thought like a thorn-“ He wraps his arm around my shoulder and leans with me against the cold stone of the outside of the house. Thankfully, the night is dry. “Is it better to know when you have been bitten by a snake but know you have no cure, or to simply die unaware that you have been poisoned and think you don’t need a cure?”

“Have you been bitten by a snake?” He asks, ruling out the immediate threat of my somehow being bitten.

“No, no. It just feels like it I think.” I stumble over my words, worrying that I’ve likened this to the wrong thing.

“Alright.” He soothes me, pondering on my question. He shifts the glass in his hand, the weight of it again on my shoulder grounds me here. “If you’re asking: ’is it better to suffer before dying or to die without suffering in the knowledge that you may die suffering’ then, Elio-” He pauses, holding a thought between his teeth as he weighs up whether to rephrase it. “I think that the same question. Suffering is not the point of living, nor dying. It just happens sometimes.” I nod and my father draws his lips together around an unlit cigarette. He offers me one wordlessly but I decline. He strikes a match against the stone behind us and lights the cigarette, breathing in deeply before countering. “Let me ask you this: is ignorance bliss?”

“Sometimes. But knowing is better than not knowing. We speak or we die...” I suggest, waving my fingers in the air, recalling my mother reading us both this old tale about a knight during a power cut the summer before last. Oliver’s summer, in fact. Of course, there is no before and only an after. “So?” I try to walk on the uneven ground my father is navigating me through metaphorically.

“So---” He starts. “--if knowing is better than not, and ignorance is only sometimes bliss, I think it’s better to know you have been bitten even if you have no cure.” He takes another long drag and removes his arm from around me, turning to face me instead. “With knowledge comes reason, Elio. Comes power. You cannot control what you do not know.” He taps my heart with the tips of two fingers like he’s knocking on a door. I understand him more clearly than I ever have before and I suspect that he shares the feeling. For years, I have underestimated my father’s wisdom because I myself had none. Yet, I’m in awe for the lives he has lived. I smile at him earnestly, though I’m not sure it appears as such. He reciprocates and smooths my hair with the hand that has just stubbed out his cigarette on the wall. “You have your mother’s eyes.” He tells me, promising that they are special without saying as much. He makes moves to head back inside ahead of my stagnant self, leaving me one last signpost before he disappears back inside. “You can suck out a snake bite, you know. It’s not just medicine or death.”

I smile at his notion. He kindly humoured my fears before dispelling them. There is always a third choice. As I feel my skin begin to lose its warmth to the night, I realise that I must make that third choice to get out of the hole that I’m in.

I return to the room, full of life that now seems to burst at my arrival. Everyone is happy to see me when I had previously thought them happy to see me go. With that same air, the night sweeps by. It’s leavened with more life than it was earlier and, like the briefest of candles, is snubbed out all too soon. We each head to our beds prematurely, all softened with wine, hastened by a power cut. My mother loudly and generously offers to read to us but we all politely decline her and drift away into the darkness. Mafalda appears from a crook in the hallway wall with candles that she is lighting for us.

Oliver leads me at the back of this pleasant queue and we all accept this ancient woman’s gift gratefully. He shuffles up the stairs with the quietness of a guest and disappears into his room. I ponder on following him in there but it feels too bold to assume, in that split second. ‘This is the third choice’, I reiterate to myself. _Tell him._ I slope away to mine with delayed steps, snuffing the candle out as I close my door behind me. After about five minutes of heavy peace, I’m stirred by a gentle rapping of knuckles on the bathroom door that separates us. The first sound is followed by a second, as they so often are.

“Scared of the dark?” I ask quietly.

“Can I come in?”

“You have to ask?” I say, a little to loud. It sounds like a crack in my throat which my soul is slipping out through.

“I wanted to be polite.” Oliver whispers as he teases the door open enough to squeeze his admirable body through. “I’m your guest, after all.” He smiles, more broadly than he has all night. “I love what you’ve done with the place.” I smile back, reactively. He curdles in me a fondness for this room that I had lost. He ambles around softly, making careful movements. They are careful enough to miss me every time I think we’ll touch. Noting this, I answer the question he hasn’t asked. Perhaps he can’t.

“My mother told me.” He doesn’t have to ask what about. I can hear his heart plummeting from his throat back down to his chest. It sounds like dropping a stone into a pool.

“I was going to tell you, but you disappeared off the line.” He apologises with fever, he sounds sick now. He looks away from me and sidles towards the window, turning himself to the tranquillity of the outside.

“You told me it would be alright.” I stammer, feeling tears slithering up the back of my nose to my eyes. “You’re getting married.” The quiver in my voice chills the air between us. I sniffle in, harshly wiping away the tears that have formed with the back of my sleeve. “How----” I lose control of my tongue and can’t say any more. It comes out like a hiss as it is. A death rattle.

“How could I?” Oliver asks for me, turning away from the moon to face me. His voice has a different kind of shake in it, a true fear that kept him from talking to me really, or touching me with any sense of meaning or longing this whole time. “Life, I guess.” He tells me. “I’m sorry.”

I wave my hand in front of my face, stifling further tears as they begin to sting my throat. I try to calm myself down as I sit on the bed, legs dangled off towards the moon. The candle Oliver brought with him, looking like a peace offering, flickers on the table at the far side of the room. “I---” He tries to speak but runs his fingers down his throat, choking the sentence out of himself. “I really, truly am.” He moves in a slow motion to the space next to me on the bed and reads my shaking, crumpled shape for a sign of protest. He sees none and sits as lightly as he can on my right hand side, taking care not to force himself on me in any way. After an incredible, leaden series of minutes that we each filled with tired exhales followed by strained inhales, through the quietest of tears that we spill but take no joy in the release of, I take in enough air to say something. Anything.

“I’ve loved you, all this time. In my own way.” My voice is in pieces, thick and cracked all at once; all tangled in the brambles grown in my windpipe.

“You never called.” Oliver poses it as a quiet rebuttal, not asking for proof necessarily but merely stating the facts that weaken my case.

“Neither did you.” I mutter, trying to make a peace between us on this suddenly strange bed. We are close but feel distant in the inches that separate us.

“You got me on that one.” He laughs softly, sniffling, trying to diffuse the tension we carry with us.

“What’s it like?” I ask him, summoning the confidence to look him in the face. Especially under the faint glow of the candle, he’s sun-kissed but unblemished still. Fresh and surely soft to the touch, velvet-skinned and as glittery-eyed as he always was here. “To have a life.”

“Don’t say that,” He scolds me tenderly, hurt at my asking it seems. “like you don’t have one.” He picks up my limp hand in his nearest and smooths it. “You’re still young, it’ll find you. And until then you always have Bach and all of his friends.” His comment makes me spit out a laugh like it’s stuck in my throat. He’s right, I’d already forgotten about playing for them all that same evening.

“’All of his friends’.” I mock him hoarsely. “If only Bach kissed me goodnight.” I muse, still sore-voiced. Oliver thinks on an idea with caution before raising his other hand to action it. He touches his open mouth with two fingers and then turns that hand to my face and presses those two fingers to my forehead. I want him to stay as he is all night. For him to push hard enough to crack through to my brain and unravel it like yarn. For him to just stay here, quiet and in the same mess that I am. But he speaks instead of dying here.

“I ask myself the same thing all the time.” He assures me of what we shared not being completely lost with this constant lightness he infuses our sorrow with. A horrible but truthful laugh bursts from my chest. His sheer comforting stupidity has wrapped its tail around me again. Everything he does, he does with care. A care so infinite that it brought him here, to tell me in person what I already knew. But, as he slides in the knife, he must take the edge off somehow; and that, I think, I why I fell in love with him.

“I thought, maybe for a few weeks, a month even, I’d gotten over you.” I whisper out, with my head leant on his towering shoulder. His fingers play with my fingers lightly, reassuring me that he is still here, despite the strangeness.

“Who: me? You couldn’t!” He jests with a genuine laugh, albeit a quiet one. “It’s just me then.” He mourns in the same mouthful. “I couldn’t if I wanted to.”

I let my eyes close and listen to his shivering heartbeat. I can’t fathom this confession. Should he kneel at my feet and ask for forgiveness? Plead with me because he is getting married in the face of being unable to let me go? Should I fall to my knees for him? I squeeze his fingers in mine to let him know that his words haven’t fallen on deaf ears.

In my head, I am stuck in a picture of us ten, fifteen years from now, as a result of tonight. He is still getting married. We must, surely, lead different lives from here on, sharing what we had like we longer have it. We’ll be burdened by a nostalgia for love as we slowly lose ours. Each bitten by the other’s snake teeth and knowing we must simply live with the poison, to suffer without dying. In this picture, that is the point. I wake myself from that nightmare with a heavy arm lifting around Oliver’s back to pull him towards me. A hug is all I can do. I think I’ve stopped crying but I can’t tell, I can no longer feel my face pressed into the fabric of his shirt, nor really feel his hand as he lifts my sodden head to face his own. It’s a blurred picture. Like a cat pawing at glass, I lift my thumb to his cheek without thinking to try and blot away streaks of tears. My vision is fogged by the dim light and the veil of water that’s stuck my eyelashes together. It’s important to him that he looks me in the eye when he speaks now, that much I can see.

“Elio-” Oliver whispers to me. “I remember everything.” That’s my gift from him, I think with a stabbing accuracy, to not be forgotten. I don’t know whether to feel elated or thoroughly sad. I try to smile at the joy his words could bring with them but I’m weak in his thrall, exhausted from having looked death in the face and spat back at it. I spare a few breaths, feeling like my lungs are full of water.

“Elio.” I croak at him, pushing as softly as I can.

“Oliver.” He murmurs, looking for some healing to be found in the wreckage of limbs in his embrace.

“Kiss me?” I ask him, like a last rite. For old time’s sake: may it haunt us until we disappear. Remember through me, in person, one last time if never again.

“Are you sure?” It’s not a no, which I can later take some solace in. In the moment, I am weary but certain that I’ve loved him in all of his greatness that I must let it swallow me again. I was halfway out of the hole he’d put me in by leaving and, thinking this my only chance to do so, I fell back in. I had my whole life to climb back out, and this might have been the last time to fall in again. A kiss I’d dreamt about a hundred times some eighteen months ago, the consummation of my imagination and desire with reality. A taste, a feeling; no exit from the daydream-made-real.

“Yes.” I promise him, moving my head to his and pressing our damp lips together. Perhaps it was wrong to take this moment from him, to burn his kind tongue with mine, but I had nothing more to say. The moment is slow, we savour it in our burgeoning unhappiness. It means something other than any touch we’ve shared before. It’s a wish that can’t be granted but is made anyway. The rash action of a dying man, for they have nothing to lose. He kisses me back with feeling, the pressure of his mouth on mine is hungry in some ways but not lustful. Oliver and I simply do not want this to end. All I had, he now has. We’re quiet between sticky breaths, both of the mind that coming up for air would leave the other to drown and we couldn’t do that anymore. We strung it out for all we could. I wrapped my slim arms around his neck and shoulders and held him to me with longing. His fingers yearned for me, around my waist and sunk deep into my hair. It was passionate and utterly sexless simultaneously. I didn’t want it to go any further than this, for once. Oliver wanted to stay here, exactly like this, until it was Summer. If he missed the wedding, he missed the wedding; ç’est la vie. He pulls me as flush to him as he can with our crooked sideways positioning. He leans me gently downwards as he kisses back, supporting me like a dancer when they’re tipped down. He pulls himself off me as soon as I’m half flat. My eyes flutters open with despair that I knew would come, at the ending of this moment that we wanted to stay in forever. I can barely make out his face in the shallow light of the room. The candle behind him casts him as a silhouette to me. He leans completely away from, stretching like a cat to pick up the candle from the far table while trying to stay sat on the bed. He picks it up and, as carefully as he can, swings it around to the bedside table next to my head. It clings to life as he does so, and celebrates its own existence when he sets it down, illuminating his upper half now positioned again over me. 

“Lie down with me.” He asks, pulling the duvet aside. “Will you?” He’s nervous suddenly that he didn’t ask. Even still, there’s a fear in him, but this time I recognise that same fear in me too. The fear of it ending. Not if but when. I pull myself up with my arms and shuffle over to where the gap under the duvet is.

“Of course.” I mumble, feeling that it doesn’t need to be said but that he’d like to hear it. He smiles a little and slides into the gap next to me, pulling the duvet up over us both as we lie here. I see the admiration in his eyes, reflected in mind from the light of the candle. Oliver adoringly strokes my face with the thumb of his hand that’s resting on my jaw.

“I leave early tomorrow, probably before you’re up.” I assume he’s asking without asking that I do not wake to watch him leave again, for both our sakes. “But, I got you something.”

“If it’s a wedding invitation I will scream.” I promise him with a weak but honest smile, fumbling for his other hand squashed between us on the bed. He tries to chuckle but his chest is empty.

“It’s not, I promise you.” He pulls my body into his, tucking me into his warmth and draping a safe arm over me. I ring his wrist with my fingers as he did to me the day before yesterday. “I’ll leave it for you.” I nestle my face into the crook of his neck and feel any weight leave my body. I lie still under the duvet and sink into the bed just enough to rest. I breathe in the intoxicating perfume of his skin as I drift off. I think I hear him whisper goodnight to me in Italian but I can’t be sure. Soon enough, I am too heavily asleep to notice that Oliver is not asleep himself and that he leaves me once I am. He spends a stretched-out hour with his face pressed into my hair, running his fingers up and down the small of my back and over the outside of my forearm. At some point in my sleep I let go of him, I must have. He blows out the candle as he leaves and walks himself sombrely back to his own bed. It’s cold without me. It takes him over an hour of pulling thoughts from his head before he can get to sleep. He is exhausted but his mind won’t let him rest.

Morning comes and brings with it new life that feels a little like death. He is gone when I wake up, though his smell on the sheets betrays that he was here and I didn’t dream it all. I stir in a state of total disorientation, easing myself out of bed with tired eyes and unsteady footsteps. I pull on clothes to wander downstairs when something out of place catches my eye in Oliver’s room. He has vanished as he promised. But there’s a small box on the table in the window, it stands out against the open vista of the clouded sky. I stop where I stand and move towards it instead, awake enough to be curious. I reach it and see that the card on the small, delicately wrapped box reads ‘Oliver’ in messy cursive handwriting. My heart rises to my throat and I steal it from its place on the table, running back on myself and tucking it under a stack of half-written notation on my desk. I make my way back downstairs, walking myself back into the knowledge that Oliver has gone and everyone knows this.

It’s on my mind as I eat my toast, boiled egg and coffee. I excuse myself from breakfast after having finished most of my food, taking my time to not look my parents in the eye lest they mention Oliver to me. As I get up to leave, my father catches my wrist and hands me my watch that I left on the piano last night. He offers it to me with a sympathetic smile, sensing the sadness that so clearly radiates from me. I hear my mother in the kitchen reply to Mafalda that my father drove Oliver to the station this morning, so, no, he’s not here for dinner this evening. All the noise of the world fades away as I wade back upstairs, driven by the need to see what’s inside that box.

I close my door behind myself and then the neighbouring one to the bathroom, leaving me in peace with the few birds that pass by the window. I unhide the box and stare at it’s label. ‘ _Oliver’_. That was enough, whatever was in the box. The charade continued.

I stick my finger under a fold in the brown paper and crack the seam of the tape open, unfolding it as best I can. The box is stuffed with newspaper which I pull out and unravel in case it happens to be important. I wouldn’t put it past him for it to be from the day he arrived here. That, I think, would break my heart. Thankfully it’s just paper. Beneath is a card, a postcard maybe? I slide it out it’s slim paper sleeve and find myself holding my breath. It’s a small artist’s rendering of Monet’s berm. Something in my middle feels sick. I swallow but my heart feels like it is stuck in my throat. Here I thought the newspaper would be the worst of it. I drop it from my frozen hands, it lands on the pile of sheet music, looking up at me. It’s from this room, he took it when he left it seems; snuck it away with him. I make myself pick it up again, feeling a sharp pang of grief pull at my throat as I try to keep my mouth closed. I turn it over in my hands, to try and eschew the stinging pain. On it’s reverse, he has written something. His handwriting is unmistakable. ‘ _It will always be that Summer. In another life, it would be Summer forever. But until then, dear Elio, it is you and I until the sun burns out. However far apart we are, we are safe here. With all my love, O. Later. x’_ My fingers are shaking holding the card. I’m torn between crying with joy and weeping with loss. I fling my hand over my mouth just as I open it to hide any sounds I make and tip my head to face the ceiling. I drop the card thoughtlessly and bring my other hand up to tap against my heart. I’m here and it’s there. A new life that feels like death at first, knocking to get in. I run to the bathroom and throw my head over the sink, letting the inevitable nosebleed trickle down me but, for once, there is nothing. I shake nonetheless, trying to still my hammering heart and my queasy stomach. I splash my face with water and linger there, suspended between surreal calmness and emptiness, holding onto the edge of the sink for support. It holds me up until I muster my legs to take me back to my desk. I try to smile looking at Oliver’s sincere and permanent declaration of love, but it takes a second to pass the urge to cry. My fingertips linger on his writing as I will it to pass. I don’t want to mourn him anymore, not right now. I want this for what it is. The twist of a cry in my windpipe catches and elicits a small howl as my other hand falls from my mouth but it turns into a smile. A rapturous sort, that is relieved to be alive. I close my eyes momentarily and welcome this rebirth before opening them again. Tenderly, I pick the card up and turn it so the front is facing me and press a chaste kiss to its surface. I slide the card back inside its sleeve and hold it to my chest for a few minutes. I tuck it into my desk drawer, safely mine and for no one else’s eyes. I bring my gaze back to the box once more and see there is something beneath where the card was. It’s a cassette. Bach’s Capriccio in B-flat major: that bastard. I tip it in my hands, letting it glint in the daylight, examining its every surface and corner before I notice a smear or sorts on the otherwise pristine case. I idly think it’s two thumb smudges, but I look closer and notices it’s the impression of two lips. The half-smile that has brought itself to my lips becomes a laugh, hollow though it is, as I realise Oliver kissed the cassette for me. Of course.

I turn my attention for a fleeting second to the thought of him on a train, travelling away from here, processing what he has said and done and how he must continue to live from now on. I hope he isn’t crying; from the pit of my stomach, I hope he has found the peace he’s waited over a year for. In the same thought, I promise that I will visit the berm as soon as Spring comes and draw him the view. I’ll send it to him in America, with a hand-noted copy of Capriccio in B-flat major. It will be a wedding present and I hope it brings him new life. Or perhaps, a second one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's all tied up!!
> 
> Do let me know what you think, I'm sorry it's sad. It's in my nature!  
> xx


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